What is the most important fact about Mayor DeBlasio’s budget proposal?
http://www1.nyc.gov/site/omb/publications/finplan01-17.page
The unsaid. During the Bloomberg Administration the “Budget Summary” document had included summary tables that showed how much money was spent on each agency for wages and salaries, how much for pensions, how much for other benefits, how much for interest, how much for lawsuits, how much for other non-personnel costs such as contracts and supplies, and how much of each function is funded by the city, and how much by other layers of government.
Last year DeBlasio provided that table for his budget proposal, but not for past years. But I was able to make a comparison with that table from prior years and write this post.
This year DeBlasio has apparently ordered that this information be omitted from the Budget Summary altogether, which is exactly the sort of stuff I fear we can expect from Trump.
I’m looking around to see if this information has been provided somewhere else. So far the answer is no. There is function-by-function information on personal services compared with non-personal services, but not wages vs. pensions vs. other benefits. So thus far I see no way I can even recreate the table the hard way. All those reports may in fact be designed to prevent this.
To see what I am talking about, check out pages 39, 40 and 41 from this old budget summary document, at least until they delete it.
And now look at last year. Notice what is missing?
I’ll keep looking, but until I can find something, that’s the story. The Budget Summary ends abruptly, and the tables in question used to be at the end. Maybe the idea is to see if they can get away with it, and if not re-upload and pretend those tables were always there.
Why would DeBlasio do this? Well, he might not want to show all the rising tax dollars we pay being sucked into the past by past retroactive pension increases, because lying about that is what the public employee unions demand in exchange for political support. And he might not want to show what share of funding is received from other layers of government, if he wants to blame the entire screwover the powerless that is coming on President Trump.
For all those allegedly committed to ideologies but in reality just the servants of interests, hiding what is going on fiscally is in their interest. Let’s talk about God, Gays and Guns and get them to support us no matter what we do to them, on behalf of those who really matter.
This particular cover up follows the City Comptroller’s decision to incorrectly report information on the NYC Teacher pension fund to the U.S. Census Bureau, to cover up how much benefits are increasing and how high they are relative to pension fund assets.
And I read that at the federal Department of Environmental Protection, they were grabbing data to move it offset out of fear that the Trump Administration would delete it.
This is the world we live in, as the walls close in in the wake of Generation Greed. What they don’t know will let us continue to hurt them. And in any event, the press won’t bother to cover it.
The Republicans have been anti-facts for some time, always seeking to de-fund the collection and dissemination of statistics about how things are going. The long form of the decennial census and the American Community Survey for example. Under pressure to cover up the real, soaring cost of public employee retirement benefits, are the Democrats set to join them?
Saying the Unsaid in New York 
Generation Greed Democrats want to lie to us about some things, and Generation Greed Republicans about others.
http://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/01/25/today-trump-gags-the-epa-tomorrow-the-gop-strangles-the-census/